Epress.am News from Armenia
Large-scale hostilities undertaken by Azerbaijan along the entire line of contact between the Artsakh Republic and Azerbaijan have targeted civilian settlements, infrastructure and caused many casualties and destruction, which is fraught with many consequences, including the risk of various infectious diseases, including especially dangerous outbreaks and epidemics.
Damage of water supply and sewerage systems causes unfavorable sanitary conditions, makes it impossible to carry out proper cleaning and disinfection activities, creating favorable conditions for the development and spread of infectious intestinal diseases (cholera, hepatitis A, dysentery, etc.).
The war zone passes through the areas of natural outbreaks of Zangezur-Karabakh and Pre-Araks plague, where both pathogens and transmitters are present. The absence of preconditions of removal, burial or exchange of the bodies of the victims, helps corpses to become transmitting of infectious diseases or natural breeding ground for insects, as well as favorable environment for feeding and breeding wild animals, and infectious, including especially dangerous, pathogens can remain viable in the environment for a long time, which creates all the preconditions for outbreaks and epidemics.
Military actions can contribute to the activation of outbreaks և increase the risk of infectious diseases transmitted by rodents (plague, tularemia, leptospirosis). The high mortality and infectivity of the plague makes it very conducive to causing mass infections.
Pollution of the environment, the reproduction of rodents that spread infectious diseases is a serious epidemic threat not only for areas of direct hostilities, but also for countries in close proximity to the conflict, particularly for the Islamic Republic of Iran, given the short distance between countries, the presence of the Araks River, which is considered to be the spread of the infection by water route to the settlements near the Araks.
The military-political leadership of Azerbaijan bears full responsibility in case of the outbreaks and epidemics during the hostilities and post-war period, as it has been continuously violating the requirements of the humanitarian ceasefire signed on October 10 for the exchange of corpses.